Automation tails from the fox hole

SCCM

Recently at work, we had a task come up which saw us needing to move tens of thousands of devices between collections in CM. We decided to run some tests to find the fastest way! We compared:

The SCCM 1511 Era Collection Cmdlets

The newly released speedier Collection Cmdlets which shipped with Tech Preview 1803

Using Keith Garner’s super powerful CMPSLib Module

Query Based Membership

AD Group Query Membership

Direct SQL Membership Tampering ☠

I’d always kind of wondered myself, so it was a fun challenge to come up with some hard numbers. And for the last item in the list…this is just for fun, I do not recommend using this in your production…or your testlab. Or anywhere.

The test lab

All testing occurred in my VM Testlab, a Ryzen 7 1700 with 64 GB of RAM, with storage served on NVMe m.2 SSD drives. A beastly machine (also hello to viewers from the year 2025 where we have 6TBs of storage on our phones and this is laughably quaint. Here in 2018, we believed more RBG = more better, and we were happy, damn it!) Continue reading →

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I’ve performed a number of Windows 10 Deployment projects, and have compiled this handy list of must-have customizations that I deploy at build time using SCCM, or that I bake into the image when capturing it.

Hope it helps, and I’ll keep updating it as I find more good things to tweak.

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Quickpost: SCCM 1602 Query – All Online Machines

With the Advent of client activity indicators in SCCM 1606:

We can now see which machines are online at a given time. I love these green checkboxes.

I thought it would be cool to try to make a collection of only currently online machines. So, into the query editor we go! We’ll add a new query rule, and then use the wizard to add a new value. This is all that you need to grab only the currently online systems.

This collection works VERY well for Incremental Updates. However, Scheduled Updates don’t make much sense

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This was a bit tricky! We completed an SCCM upgrade for one customer from SCCM 1511 to 1602, and made use of the nice pre-production client validation feature.

This allows you to specify a collection of test systems to receive the new SCCM client, for you to validate in your environment.

After a few days of validation, we were ready to pull the trigger and upgrade everyone. This is done under Administration \ Cloud Services \ Updates and Servicing \ Client Update Options. However, when we tried to do this, it was grayed out!

Root Cause

Before trying to upgrade the client, I thought we should un-check the pre-production Collection box in Hierarchy Settings. This is done in Administration \ Sites\ Hierarchy Settings.

Don’t do this! If you uncheck this box, the SCCM ui will detect it, and gray out the SCCM won’t display the UX we need to promote the SCCM client to production.

Fix

Make sure that you check the Pre-production client box. If this isn’t checked, SCCM doesn’t know to show you the UI for upgrading the client across production!

Once this is done, you can go to Updates and Servicing, and click Client Update Options.

Complete this UI and SCCM will automatically uncheck the pre-production client for you as well. Thanks SCCM!